Director of Public Affairs, Christine Quigley, writes about the return of Stormont this week after a three year absence.

Following three years of logjam in Stormont, the political parties in Northern Ireland have been able to agree a new deal to restore the institutions and bring back devolution of powers to the region.

On Friday, the UK Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Julian Smith MP, and Ireland’s Tánaiste and Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade, Simon Coveney TD, published New Decade, New Approach, which outlines the text of an agreement made between the British and Irish Governments and the five main Northern Irish parties – the unionist Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) and Ulster Unionist Party (UUP), the nationalist Sinn Féin and Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) and the unaligned Alliance Party.

The deal is broken down into two sections, the first covering the priorities for the new Northern Ireland Executive, and the second outlining the constitutional and political changes needed for the parties to take a new approach to Government.

Top priorities for the new Northern Ireland Executive are a new long-term funding strategy for the NHS, increasing infrastructure investment, delivering new social housing and investing in education and justice.

Under the UUP’s Robin Swann as Health Minister, the new Executive will focus on tackling high waiting times and on new action plans for mental health, alcohol and drugs and cancer, alongside 900 new undergraduate nursing and midwifery places a year. Interestingly, neither the two largest parties nor the SDLP chose to take on the vital health brief, potentially suggesting concerns about the deliverability of the ambitious programme set out in the deal.

The SDLP’s Nichola Mallon takes on the important infrastructure brief, with plans to introduce a strategy to address immediate and longer-term impacts of climate change and legislation to reduce carbon emissions, as well as matched capital funding for infrastructure, regeneration and tourism projects as part of the Belfast and Derry/Londonderry City Deals.

The new Education Minister, the DUP’s Peter Weir, will be responsible for introducing a new special educational needs framework and an independent review of education provision focused on driving greater efficiency and raising standards. The deal specifically addresses cross-community issues in education, committing the Executive to educating children of different backgrounds in the same classroom, while also to introducing an action plan to address links between background and educational underachievement, particularly for working-class Protestant boys. Naomi Long of the Alliance Party will be the new Justice Minister, with the key priority to speed up the criminal justice system in Northern Ireland.

Sinn Féin’s Deirdre Hargey, who was only co-opted to the Assembly in December but is seen as a rising star within her party, will be the new Communities Minister. She will lead on a new anti-poverty strategy, legislation to reclassify housing associations to support housing associations to continue building and tackling the maintenance backlog for Northern Ireland Housing Executive properties.

One of the key stumbling blocks to a deal over the past three years has been the implementation of a standalone Irish Language Act, or Acht na Gaeilge, to give Irish equal status with English in the justice and education systems. Sinn Féin and civil society campaigners have been calling for standalone legislation on this for a number of years, and while the deal does not include a standalone Act, it makes significant concessions towards it by promising legislation to create an Irish language Commissioner, to provide official recognition of the status of the Irish language and to repeal the nearly-300-year-old Administration of Justice (Language) Act (Ireland) which restricted the use of languages other than English in courts in Ireland. This will be complemented by legislation to create a further Commissioner to support the Ulster Scots language and provide official recognition of its status, a key demand of unionists.

Overall, the new deal spells out an ambitious programme for the Northern Ireland Executive. Delivering this will require significant cross-party co-ordination and collaboration. The deal’s promise to restrict the use of Petitions of Concern, which previously meant in practice that one party could veto legislation, is a welcome sign of the intention of all parties to work together. Businesses and civil society organisations will no doubt be gearing up to engage with the new Executive on its long list of priorities.